the joys of home baking

Are there better things to do than come home from your 48 hour work week, take your dog grocery shopping, and pick blackberries from your backyard? I think not. I've got perhaps 2 cups of ripe berries, which means tomorrow I get to make cornmeal dough from the Chez Panisse Fruit book and do tartlettes. I'll even give them to the writers on Wednesday if they turn out well...I've still got last week's pie kicking around and that Clover half and half the fridge is really just an excuse to make more custards since the peach leaf custards from last week didn't turn out so well. I took the proportions and infusion instructions from the peach leaf parfait and used them for creme brulees and the resulting custard is so bitter only my Persian mananger at Frog Hollow would like it :( (but the panna cottas and peach leaf syrup were flavored perfectly. hmph.)

The peach leaf custard itself, though (courtesy of David Lebovitz rather than Cheffy for the small batch size), is so smooth and sexy and eggy-perfect despite only needing 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven and not the 50 minutes the recipe suggests.

My old boss would be nodding gruffly and pleased to see me covering my custards tightly with foil and making sure they don't curdle. I'm pleased, but I want edible, sweet custard...ginger-lemon, perhaps, or plain vanilla bean with blackberries?

The roommate requested the chocolate cherry tart I was never than pleased with for her birthday present. She said she tried to think of all the things she'd had she'd liked the best recently and came up with that. I shrugged and asked pastry chef questions pertaining to which version she liked best, how she felt about the winey taste of Scharffen Berger 70% (she wants me to mix some with the E. Guittard 62% kicking around the house), discussed how I have to candy my sale bin cherries from last week's Berkeley Bowl trip. Still got my Blenheims which ideally I'll roast and think about how I want to roast my apricots for the vanilla babycakes (butter, pepper, honey, nada mas?). I'm very VERY happy I'm making vanilla cakes because I adore that recipe. And look forward to snacking. I'm happy to make her the chocolate cherry cake...but I wish I liked it better.

Cupcake craziness over for another week. Sometimes it gets daunting, looking at all those cupcakes. Thinking about all those cupcakes. I'll make 30 L of batter, or bake two Cambros and frantically make more. De-pan in quick 2x2 succession. The boss liked my piping technique this morning--I'm happy.

Dinner now. Mushrooms, zucchini, onion and roma tomatoes sauteed with pasta. Got them all at Mi Ranchito for a dollar. Soon, I'll get to go to the Thursday night FB market...but no mas Mi Ranchito. Add it to the things to miss about the East Bay.

taste, memory

It's hot out tonight in a sticky, East-coast kind of way, and I miss New York. Tonight while I walked the dog, I pretended I was in Poughkeepsie. It isn't hard. The streets of my neighborhood are alive in the same way the streets of Po-town are alive. The only stores open are places you don't really want to go in, places that hold weird hours. Dudes sit on the street corners and call out to you in a friendly sort of way. You overhear all sorts of sounds--music from the cars or houses, kids you feel like might have better places to be. There are too many liquor stores. There aren't enough places to get fresh produce. Where I am is mostly Mexican, and in Poughkeepsie the dominant culture is an uneasy blend of Italian and West Indian (mostly Jamaican) in the city, and white folks in the town. At the farm market across form Vassar I'd sell tomatoes to old Italian mamas and to the lady who ran the Vietnamese restaurant, and to young families with food stamps, my teachers, my friends.

But if I were in Poughkeepsie right now I'd find a way to get across my favorite bridge



and steal my favorite adventure buddy

away from her job as farmer this farm.



We'd take the train down to the city, and does it ever need another name or an introduction, that city? Then we'd be in my favorite place, Grand Central, and we'd run downstairs and hop one of the express trains downtown to Union Square where we'd wander the Greenmarket and I'd probably still be able to get some of my favorite apples from someone's cold cellar. I'd buy nuts from one of the street vendors. We'd go to Dean and Deluca's (again), because it's my New York ritual and I have to. I mean (of course) the one on Price Street, so that afterward we could go to HousingWorks bookstore and Kate's Paperie, and of course we would not have wandered to Dean and Deluca's without stopping at my other New York ritual, The Strand where with any luck I could finally buy myself a used copy of Claudia Fleming's cookbook and if my Hamptons-house-having friends could host actually eat some Claudia Fleming dessert. Right now. But in New York I'd cut across the Village to the Haagen Daaz by Carmine street and begin wandering the West Village looking for McNulty's. I'd go to Brooklyn. Walk through Prospect Park with my friends. Eat at Sea, and go to the bar with the really good burlesque, and order a pint of Yuengling and then a pint of Lager and drink them slowly. I'd actually visit the Doughnut Plant. I'd go to Fabiane's for some chocolate mousse. I'd remember how the streets smell and how they feel. How it feels to go rushing around like there's always someplace better you have to be, how it feels to put on that stone mask a simple act like getting to work requires, how it feels to be on the train clacketying through the center platform, on your way somewhere, now. How it feels to want so badly to be on your way somewhere. How it feels to be stuck.

I would ride the yellow trains all the way out to Coney Island and stand in that sand ditch, right at the point where the people are hidden and when you look straight ahead all you can see is sand and then ocean. The East Coast.

Maybe it's okay if someone else is doing these things right now. If some other girl is buying roasted nuts on her way home from work. If someone is having a pint with his buddy at Enid's or that black and red bar down by the L train. Some other cute baker is eating at North Fork tonight, or at Sea, or is just walking around listening to the crazy rush of New York and daydreaming of how the fog looks when it hangs low over the Golden Gate Bridge and it feels so good to be in the bright blue air and walking down Marina Blvd after a day of making cupcakes.



I've been doing lots of fiction-writing and it makes me introspective. But maybe it's just the heat, the way tonight feels like a thousand nights spent on the other side of the country.

more stories from the kitchen

(just when i thought i'd worked that one out, sheesh, after six months of writing about my so-called profession, which is one third of the time i've actually been a cook, damn, which makes this about as long as i've stuck with anything professionally, excepting writing of course, which never goes away).

The line cook started to tell me her tale this afternoon, while I swept counters and creamed butter. How she isn't like the others at Abeille, how she doesn't do drugs or drink way too much, how she's nervous and new and tough but not cocky. How she's friends with the patissier because they work days. How she will have sex with the Chef in the walk in while the Chef's brokenhearted, hand still maimed, barely working, how it will be a secret from Anna, how this will mean that she, Angie, the line cook, is cheating on her girlfriend whom she loves, LOVES. How devastation wrecks a career/a restaurant, how we try to dis-place our love when someone doesn't want it anymore, and how we step up to help others we admire even if it means that our actions are suddenly strange to us, that we are no longer who we thought we were. Angie, the newest line cook, watching Chef, the one that everybody wants too much from.

Two more days of work and then a day off. We're prepared for biblical cupcake floods tomorrow. Probably we overcompensated and mised way too much, but it was nice to go in this afternoon and not urgently need anything. The FB market was slammed today, too. Some customer jerked his roller skates into our table and took out three full sheet trays of pastries. Barely apologized. Thank god it was toward the end of the market, and not anything I'd toiled over all day. I'm getting the hang of preparing for Saturdays there. Last week was slow, so I had lots of free time but today I barely got Sunday's bread pudding into the oven and had to rely on Juan to take it out because I had to leave! All my baked goods were done or mised, so the physicaly labor of it today was just traying, restocking, baking off and decorating.

I have a new job

...So why is it that everyone in SF starts looking for pastry people now?

I've never been solicited for a job before, but today I got the following email from the folks over at the Slanted Door:

Hi. I received your resume a while ago and I am looking for a pastry cook again. I belive you already have a job but If you are interested, please contact me.

Thank you.

_____ ________
_________@slanteddoor.com

And, not so very long ago when I was in the height of my then-fruitless desire to come out to San Francisco, I posted here about my longing, and how Slanted Door was hiring and I'd sent them my resume...and about three weeks before that I was all atwitter becase Boulette's and Frog Hollow were hiring, and wrote the following:

anyway, not only is Frog Hollow hiring right now, but Boulettes Larder is hiring a pastry chef as well, and though I am no doubt both too poor to get out there and unqualified for the second position, I am jealous. To work in the Fery Building adn spend every afternoon in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, reminiscing about the Berkeley days and who I used to be...and to write...and to eat, and be in such bounty.

And now here I am. On the day I got my new job, I also got chased out of Boulette's Larder by Lori Regis. Hounded from the second I walked in the door. The question is why...I have a few guesses but I'm not going to post them here yet. I'm going to go back another time, in my Boston hat (so she knows the Regis I know better is Susan), and see what happens.

Work was intense today. If I don't get to mise properly on Friday, Saturdays are always crazy, and if they run out of everything and I have to bake off five items at once nevermind that I'm in the middle of slicing fruit for fruit tarts and I've got shortbread to assemble, it's very challenging to not get in the weeds. And I feel pressured to get my nice things out there early, so they can sell.

My new job is at Kara's Cupcakes, an all cupcake bakery in the Marina. The'yre opening a second location next week at Gihrardelli Square so they just basically doubled their baking staff. The kitchen is small, and the walls are pink, but they've got this cute map showing where their lcoally-sourced products come from, and they've got the best cream cheese frosting I've tasted here in SF, a city obsessed with cream cheese frosting, and I'm looking forward to being chill and piping icing, mixing batter, having the sort of experience I was cheated out of having to have at Miette.

I have to stop and remind myself that not very long ago, I ached to be out here doing what I'm doing, and now I'm doing it. And writing a lot. And getting my first experience being creatively in charge. When people tell me (without knowing I make them, per se) how they LOVE the strawberry lavender tarts, it's such a nice feeling. Food is love. And you have to be generous; you have to give it away. So when it upsets me to be treated roughly, I know there are so many crazies and egos in this business, and I know where I stand and where I come from. I've paid a lot of dues and I'll pay them still, but I'm going to be generous in this business and I'm going to one day do things perfectly.

Tomorrow's Day #1 at Kara's.